This comprehensive examination of eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture explores its extreme diversity within the context of tremendous social, economic and political upheaval. Never before had the functional requirements and expressive capacities of architecture been tested so thoroughly and with such diversity of invention. Bergdoll traces this experimentation in a broad range of contexts, focusing in particular on the relation of architectural design to new theories of history, new categories of scientific inquiry, and the broadening audience for architecture in this period of transformation. Unlike traditional surveys with long lists of buildings and architects, the themes are elucidated by in-depth coverage of key buildings which in turn are situated in both their local and European context.

Barry Bergdoll is Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York. Author and editor of numerous works on 19th century architecture, he has served as curator or curatorial consultant at the Musee d'Orsay, Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has served as exhibitions editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.